The BBC Thompson unbiased mindset is made up of a complete set of nanny-state values that is based, in turn, on fantasy views of science and human development. One of the central axioms is that life in nature and the past was idyllic. People grew their own food, didn’t produce any carbon dioixide, didn’t burn nasty fossil fuels and lived in constant orgasmic stasis (or whatever tendy word is in vogue). Anyone who advocates such ideas is instantly elevated to sainthood, or at the very least, front page status on the BBC website. So it is today for this piece of moonshine, carefully crafted by BBC health zealot Jane Elliot. She talks admiringly of a group of behaviour police in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, who are touring schools telling long-suffering youngsters that if they eat like peasants (peasants, note, not the villanous landowners because they crammed themselves with expensive nasties) did in medieval times, they will not get fat and not taint their bodies with vile salt or – shock, horror – food from abroad.
That will be the medieval diet that meant in reality that there was a life expectancy of around 30-35, diseases were rampant and there was a dependence on local food that meant every period of bad weather or low rainfall spelled starvation for our ancestors. Not to mention the back-breaking labour involved. There’s an excellent critique of the food problems of the past here; the writer also brilliantly shows how the greenie obsession with localism and organic food is dangerous, self-indulgent nonsense. For the thought police of Mr Thompson’s unbiased BBC, of course, the brilliant analysis of Mr Budiansky is heresy against the green creed and will never see the light of day.
It looks to me as if food historian Caroline Yeldham – if that’s her in the picture – follows a most unmedieaval diet of pie, chips and ice cream.
I’m not sure if that’s her or not, but what it does tell me is that someone at the BBC has a sense of humour.
“…the brilliant analysis of Mr Budiansky is heresy against the green creed and will never see the light of day…”
All the more ironical given that Budiansky describes himself as a liberal.
The irony never stops. Apart from the sight of Ms Yeldham, who is the embodiment of someone in permanent snacking mode, we have this:
“We will use history to develop a less preachy approach to modern health.”
I venture to suggest that staying the hell out of the classroom in the first place would be much “less preachy”. I’ve got a better idea – how about a real radical agenda. like leaving the schools to concentrate on teaching our children to read, write and do maths first?
I might be wrong but I think the rape of small boys and recreational drugs were common in medieval times, sounds idyllic for beeboids.
Also Islam wants to take us back to such times as well. Of course e had no TV or BBC then, so perhaps it wasn’t all that bad?
Think you’re taking this a little too far – all that’s been said is medieval peasants were probably better off than today’s mcdonalds eating chavs – healthier fresh food, less of it and a hell of lot more activity, I don’t think disease or hygiene is really being discussed
Bob: Truly shocking:
‘a lot more activity’
Well considering they would be working on a farm from sunrise to sunset and perpetually on the verge of famine.
I don’t think the article was insinuating that we should be reducing ourselves to famine inducing diets, nor changing farming methods – the point that we are, for the most part, far less active than pretty much all are ancestors whether farm peasants or factory workers, stands, for some reason this post thinks the article is encouraging us to go back to the dark ages, when all its saying is ironically the poor of old used to have healthier food than that of todays
True. But this is often the first step on that educational path. The BBC has form.
Just a casual glance at the fossil record left by our ancestors would blow this BS out of the water. Trouble is the fossil record is hard forensic evidence that is impossible to spin and so is excluded.
I almost despair……
How’re we supposed to receive the BBC’s garbage if we don’t have economies-of-scale produced televisions? There’s no part in the production of a television that doesn’t require the input of heavy industry and/or the use of petrochemicals.
You’re not going to be able to indoctrinate people with your agenda if the only people who own a wooden, ‘sustainable’, massively inefficient and extortionately expensive TV set are a handful of right-on, more-money-than-sense ecofascists, BBC. Think, McFly, think. Can you really be that stupid? You seem to have a knack of advocating things that’d lead to your destruction: Islam, Environmentalist, Socialism. Damn.
“In general, medieval diet lacked vitamins A, C and D. Their diet was also low in calories which, among other factors, explains the low life expectancy of the Middle Ages.”
http://www.medievality.com/medieval-food.html
She must be mixing up “peasants” with “Lords”. Peasants were lucky to have rye bread and water. All the game etc belonged to the Lord, peasants would not get any.If you had to go back a 500 years you would not want to be a peasant.
Don’t forget the occasional outbreak of ergot poisoning.
Bob said:
“when all its saying is ironically the poor of old used to have healthier food than that of todays”
Sorry Bob but the poor of old had a diet far less healthy than today and the further you go back the unheathier it was, people used to drink beer because drinking water usually meant a painful death, disease and starvation were common among the poor, food quality was awful only when our grandparents were born, food was often rotten and putrid by the time it got to the cities and the poor could only afford the dregs of what the middle and upper classes left behind. Offal was thought to be meat by the poor and it was often close to rotting before it hit the tables of the poor.
Before refrigeration foodstuffs went off in summer so fast and it took so long to get it to market that illness from eating the little food the poor could obtain was commonplace.
Everything we take for granted used to be a luxury for the elites, clean water and proper sewers and hygene and fast to market cheap clean food and water fit to drink.
Infant mortality was so high because only a minority of infants had the srongest immune system to ride out the storm of germs and diseases.
The olden days were hard and miserable for the poor with starvation an ever present ghoul at the table, I suggest you read Dickens and other Victorian writers who describe the reality of life in the olden days, what was eaten by whom and how hard it was to even get water fit to drink.
Our food has never been as cheap and clean and reliable and heathy as it is now, even the junkiest of modern foods is like the Gods ambrosia to what the poor had to endure in centuries past. Take the story of bread and its manufature and distribution only 100 yrs ago, the quality was often appalling and teeth were broken by the million with bits of grit from the grinding wheel, rat shit and flies were a common ingredient with hygene that would make a dog puke.
The olden days at the bottom of the food chain and at the communal pump were a nighmare and that nightmare only came to an end with the massive industrial expansion and attendant wealth of the 20th century.
We owe all our luxurious surroundings to the industrial world, trying to ignore that and even drag us back to the past as if it were some kind of wonderful Eden is wrong wrong wrong.
Life was short and brutal and hard, you went hungry and starved and lived in squalor and died early if you were poor.
My grandfathers family could sometimes barely afford a rancid piece of slink(dead unborn farm animal) or sheep brains if the tally man left them with a few pennies at the end of the week with rotten veg that would gag a maggot BTW thats why we have a tradition of boiling the shit out of everything we eat because it was so unclean that anything less than a boiled down sludge was likely to see you in a paupers grave and where they often left the table as hungry as when they sat down.